Haxe: The little known secret to scalable, cross-platform game creation

so this this talk is going to be a little bit different from the previous talks my name is Craig Robinson and I am chief revenue officer at flow play we make a number of MMOs the most well-known is called Vegas world it's a virtual social casino and as chief revenue officer my role is to think a lot about how to make money in games and how to optimize revenue from games but that's not what I'm going to talk about today I'm gonna talk about what I think it's important to think about before you think about revenue generation and revenue optimization and that's the craft of game creation and specifically I'm going to talk about using hacks and I'll get into exactly what hacks is to create games so before

I go any further is anybody here familiar with hacks okay we got a couple of people all right so this is gonna be a pretty high-level talk it's not super technical it's going to give you an idea of what you can do with hacks and why you might want to use it to build your next game but before we talk about that I want to talk about cycling so this is a picture from this weekend of my friend Ben and I riding up hurricane ridge which is over on the Olympic Peninsula a couple hours from here we had great weather it was a beautiful day and so I'm a cyclist but I'm what's known in the cycling community as a mammal a mammal stands for middle-aged men in lycra and we're a good-looking bunch I'm not in this shop but these are my friends so if you're not familiar with this species of human you'll often see

us in a Starbucks on maybe a Sunday afternoon walking around like this in cycling shoes and in clothing that's too tight I have a point I promise this is my bike and I love this bike I just got it a couple of weeks ago it's made by the Rodriguez or the Arnie cycle company here in Sea and it's hand-built custom-made they've measured me they talked to me about what kind of cycling I do they put on all the components that I wanted it's just right they even customized the head tube for me they put this little Bandito guy on the front and Arnie cycles has been making hand-built bicycles in Seattle since 1973 and when you when I think about you know building bicycles and

building games there's something for me that comes to mind and that's the idea of craftsmanship games building games as an engineering discipline but it it's still much more of a craft than it is a science and so is building hand-built bicycles these guys really put a lot of care and thought into every bike that they build their shop is in the basement of their office or of their store this is a wave that's Dan towel he's the owner I got to go on a tour of the of the bike shop when I when I bought the bike this is a bike being made in a jig the bikes are made from steel most bikes today are made from carbon fiber they're highly engineered steel has some properties that many people find beneficial over carbon fibers specifically in terms of ride quality

and traditionally steel bikes are heavier than carbon fiber but these guys have found a way to make super lightweight steel bikes this is a tool that they have in the shop it's a spoke cutter it's made by a company called Phil wood they're also a local bike or not they're not local they're an American they're in San Jose but American bike component manufacturer this is a 40 year old tool it's got you probably can't see it here but it's got serial number number 8 on it they use this tool because it works and because they have decided that this is all the the best tool to do the job so this bike is made by the specialized company I'm gonna talk about games here in a minute I promise this is a really nice bike it's highly

engineered it's made of carbon fiber this is what the pros ride and any any cyclist would love to have this bike but there's some things I want to point out about it because it's highly engineered to be aerodynamic it's got some elements that are not as customizable it's got a proprietary head tube it's got a proprietary stem that's because it's more aerodynamic but they needed to make a proprietary this model doesn't have it but some of them have protect proprietary brakes that are built into the into the fork it's got a proprietary seat tube because it's also for aerodynamics so I can't go out buy any seat tube and upgrade this bike I need to need to buy it from specialized specialized is a big company this is where they design their bikes they're actually manufactured by a completely different company in Asia maybe I think they have three different companies they work with to manufacture

their bikes this is our any cycles just up the street here in Seattle where they've been for 40 years this is their storefront tiny little shops okay that's five minutes on bikes let's talk about let's talk about software so what is haxe the descriptions right here I'll read it for it haxe is an open-source tool kit based on a modern high-level strictly typed programming language across compiler a complete cross-platform standard library and ways to access each platforms native capabilities so it's tools for software creation it's traditionally been used for game creation but it's by no means limited to game creation there are lots of applications that are built with hacks as well the title miss Huck is the little-known secret to cross-platform game development I'll talk about why it's cross platform or cross-platform

scalable game development I'll talk about why it's cross-platform light why it's a little known I'm not quite sure except that it has been around a long time it was first released in 2006 but they don't do any advertising are any cycles by the way then engineering advertising either it's just based on word-of-mouth and and people loving their bikes but the people that have built packs are really software craftspeople Nikola the creator of packs is a game developer he uses it for his games now he created it to make games so hex was created and is shepherded by a small community of really passionate people that care about software development and this is a picture down here of the hack summit that we had we held last week in Seattle in our offices Hugh Sanderson the guy who's speaking in

this picture and is pictured up here maintains the C++ target and he's been working on it over ten years and these people are very accessible I've met most of them and it's not just them there are other people in the community that have contributed but this is the core team that kind of moves the the the language forward it's gone through three different versions version four of the language is about to be released with a lot of nice features that if we have time I can talk about so I'm going to talk about the top 10 reasons why you might want to use hacks to build your next game number 10 it's open source all of the source code for hax its standard library all of the tools are available on github the compiler itself was licensed under GPL too but the standard libraries licensed under MIT so it can be used in commercial projects and as I said the

compiler team and other people in the community or very accessible it's easy to interact with them if you have any questions or problems one of the things I love about open source is the ability to fix problems if you encounter them on your own and then contribute those fixes back to the community or even extensions and things like that we had a we had a bug and it was a fairly obscure bug in ipv6 implementation in hacks and we were able to make a fix patch that locally put it in a pull request and they had it patched within a day or two and and onto the main branch number nine it's cross-platform so I mentioned this before but what it what do I mean by this hacks works in a bit different way than other types of compilers what hacks does is is translate the hacks language and I'll talk about kind of some elements of the hex language in a minute but it

takes the hex language and it translates it to other high-level languages or byte codes for VM for execution on VMs and you can see it it supports a large number of targets that it can output code for so the way you build software and hacks is you write it in the hax language and then if you're going to go to web you just output to JavaScript but if you're gonna go to mobile you output to C++ then compile that C++ with your native development tools so all the code that's running on mobile that is generated with hacks is native code there's no player required or VM required it's actual native code and you can even go in and read the code and debug the code if you want to what that means is that from a single code base you can hit web you can hit mobile you can hit consoles you can hit platforms that we haven't even heard of yet because it just is a matter of creating a back-end for translation of the

language to that platform number eight it's easy to learn so hacks the hex syntax is very similar to ActionScript anybody who knows ActionScript and pick up hacks in a matter of days even if you don't know ActionScript it's a it's a very straightforward and accessible language to learn you don't need any ID IDs to build with tax we we we do use some editing tools like IntelliJ or Visual Studio code but technically all you need is a text editor and you can execute the hack code in our browser so it's very easy to to start using number seven it's proven it's been used by a large number of companies probably more than you would have guessed if you haven't heard of it

before but many people don't know this but the tivo UI is built in hacks and open FL which is a library that runs on top of hacks that I'll talk about later a number of large game companies have built games with hacks and a number of smaller companies are also using hacks and then some in between companies like flow ply for instance one of the early success earlier successes and hacks is a game called papers please and it's a one a huge number of awards I think it was released in 2013 I'm gonna show a video of it now it's sort of a dystopian document based puzzler we have audio on it [Music] [Music]

this is a 2d game [Music] because I haven't come other videos to show we don't buy this next game is called defender smallest nice sorry dead cells under suppose this is a more recent release it's a sort of a roguelike Metroidvania [Music] [Music]

so those are just two examples there are literally thousands of games that have been built in hacks some some very highly critically acclaimed games number six open FL open FL is a library that sits on top of hacks that emulates the flash API it's what we used it flow play to port our ActionScript game that was written originally for flash over 1.4 million lines of code from ActionScript to hacks and there's there's a great talk by our CTO Doug Pearson about that process if you're interested in and what what we did to to affect that port and you can find it online but open FL makes taking a game that was written for Flash and bringing it to hacks very easy because all the same api's are supported

but they're not just supported in flash I mean I you can use you can use hacks to output to flash but we can also output html5 and to native mobile and to other platforms using the same API is that we've formally just used with the Flash Player this is a Vegas world [Music] Vegas world is a casino game with a number of smaller games within it so we've got slot machines and blackjack and poker also avatars that have parties and give gifts and interact with each other [Music] ran for many years in actionscript under flash and then we ported it very successfully to hacks and didn't miss a beat in terms of revenue and user acquisition number five hex Flixel is a

game engine that's built on top of hacks and open FL that's used for creation of 2d games so it does a lot of things that you would expect from a game engine like to find things like sprites and loaders and things like that defenders quest is a critically acclaimed game that was built on deluxe critically acclaimed genre-bending tower defense RPG hybrid staple your butt to the edge of your seat because things are about to get off the proverbial chain gameplay sublime imagine the maze munching madness of tactical tower defense game play where each tower is a persistent fully fitted game skills to level up weapons and items to equip and customization to be customized as you forge your way through the crumbling scraps of civilization in search of the ultimate prize freedom story trends this game was recently ported to the switc geological wonder turns medieval plague colony

where the arrival of a necromancer has escalated the threat level from crap - flaming crap on a crap sandwich with a crappuccino cherry on top steel yourself against the homos naked plague corpses littered the streets rise up and serve your blood for the nefarious purposes of their mysterious master sized titanic click furiously as you deploy your defenders against the crowd it's very funny video you can watch it later online a few if you want we're running a little bit out of time here so number 4 kha so kha is a as it says ultra portable high performance open source multimedia framework it's built on top of hacks I would define it as a library for building hardware accelerated 2d and 3d games and it is the underlying framework on which armory is built armory is an open-source 3d game engine that is integrated with blender so you

can use blender to model your scenes and set up animations and and game seems I'm going to show a video of some demos that were created with armory so as you can see hacks isn't limited to just 2d games you can do full 3d there's a full 3d first-person shooter okay I have no idea why he's shooting sponsors so that's armory number two heaps heaps is also a kind of a game graphics engine built on top of hacks it was created by Nicola who is the creator of hacks it

and probably the best way to show off the features of there just to show the game that Nicolas company North Guard created using heaps [Music] I haven't played this game yet but I'm super excited to play [Music]

so that's north guard built on heaps and hacks and then I want to bring us back around for the final reason why you might want to consider using hacks to build your game and that's this idea of craftsmanship and I'm gonna try and read this poem to you and my best dramatic voice but I I really thought I really thought it kind of embodied the idea of craftsmanship it's called the craftsman by Markus Christian I apply with all the cunning of my art this little thing and with consummate care I fashioned it so that when I depart those who come after me shall find it fair and beautiful it must be free of flaws pointing no laboring zuv weary hands and there must be no flouting of the laws of beauty as the artist understands through passion yearnings infinite yet dumb I lift you from the depths of my own mind and gild you with my soul's white heat to plumb

the souls of future men I leave behind this thing that in return this solace gives he who creates true beauty ever lives and I really think that sometimes that idea of craftsmanship gets lost when we talk so much about making money from our games but you know the best games start with that idea in mind and the idea that you care about what you're creating and that you want to create something that has beauty and makes the world a better place and so you know this specialized s-works if somebody gave me this bike I'm not saying I would turn it down but I know what bike I want to spend my time writing thanks a lot and if there's any questions I'm happy to take them Oh overwhelming Oh thumbs up okay fair

enough um I just want Chris now well because we are next because not here so I um why I miss the boat the middle so apologies you've dealt with us but why kind of obviously this to like unity and epic and I'm literally tells the why hacks what's the biggest advantage because that all those other platforms are trying to be crate once publish everywhere so what's the biggest thing advantage Firth if you're using a tour acts well it's the ten reasons I over you over all yeah over unity specific I guess I'm not to try and craft a fight with units here but that's you know that's the popular indie developer of choice sure and I and I think unity is a fine a platform for game creation as well I think it depends that you need to look at you know what your situation is as a studio what kind of tools you're familiar with any game any especially cross-platform game development technology you're going to you're gonna inherit some set of problems and you need to decide what types of problems

you want to deal with yeah I think with I talked a little bit of mostly through analogy about things like proprietary systems and vendor lock-in and things like that so I think one of the biggest advantages of a pax is is that it is open source and that there are people who are contributing it to it and you can contribute to it if you want there are all the libraries for it are open source and so there's this there's this open community of people who are who want to make this this a better tool for for game development cool sorry I would get on to ask you a question so Barthel is really good it's very very have a poem right in it in all about or the first like that's the thank you very much ever follow around oh those are questions sorry Oh hacks for I haven't had a slide on that this isn't her that was the stage a stage question very good this who's not this was not staged so these are these

are some of the features and and acts for we were just introduced to this the at the hex conference at the hex summit in Seattle last Friday some of this is pretty technical so I won't go through each and every one of these but if you're interested I'll be happy to go through it with you offline after the talk cool yeah no question thirty-five people yeah it was a relatively small showing in Seattle most of the hacks folks are in in Europe we got we have a few few a few hardcore people here but much bigger community in Europe right now yep thanks a lot cool thanks very much